How to Think Like a Maker: Values Your Company Should be Adopting

Cupcake cars... you get the idea. (justgrimes)/notbrucelee/Flickr

The 5th annual World Maker Faire, which took place in the latter part of 2014 in Queens, New York, was an event that celebrated all aspects of the global Maker Movement. Over 530,000 people have collectively attended the 100 plus local Maker events held in 2013, and World Maker Faire organizers estimated that over 85,000 makers and fans came to the 2014 fair. Attendance and buzz was particularly strong due to President Obama’s proclamation of 2014 being “The Year of the Maker.”

Maker Culture has coalesced into a formal movement over the past 10 years, taking strands from punk rock, traditional DIY, hacking and open source computing and the trend towards DIY peer to peer education and woven them into a cohesive, identifiable whole. While generally technology focused (think: 3D printing, robotics, arduino) Maker Culture has expanded to include low tech, arts and crafts based projects along with food and content as well.

Throughout the weekend of World Maker Faire, sparks & honey visited over 800 projects and spoke with close to 100 participants to distill down what we observed as several key values of a maker. These values might shift from maker to maker, but the four themes kept reappearing as a pattern amongst participants.

In order to be more responsive, creative and in-sync with culture, companies should look to adopt these four values:

Be open. The Maker Movement is known for priding themselves on being open source — experimenting and sharing their results amongst friends and associates and not keeping the knowledge locked up within themselves. Another term we use for this is “open brand API” – sharing IP and tools to better harness the innovation that only comes from lots of little inputs from the crowd. Two recent examples of this include Hasbro’s 3D printed fan art and GE’s Green Bean Maker Module.

Embrace imperfection. Makers are more interested in learning and experimenting rather than perfection and that’s OK. They try (and fail) often to perfect their projects and to make lots of small bets which eventually lead them to THE BIG IDEA. Makers do it for the fun first and iterate and refine as they go.

Love the process. A focus on trusting the process rather than outcome is essential to the Maker mentality. Creativity and making is an ongoing rhythm, a lifestyle which is more a way of being than a hobby or isolated event. Makers solve problems, test hypotheses and try to make crazy ideas real. An example of this is a popup laboratory sparks & honey created with PepsiCo’s Culture and Marketing Innovation team, which celebrated the “future of beverages.” Participants experimented with creating unusual flavor combinations, reimagining how drinks are packaged as well as playing with the different states of liquids and exploring the role of sensorial cues in effecting taste perception.

Build community. Community is essential to the Maker Movement’s success as a way to meet “the others,” learn, teach and share knowledge – and from a sense of belonging and ownership of the often crowd-powered projects. Maker communities can be physical, like hackerspaces and makerspaces, temporal – such as meetups and mini-faires or on digital platforms like forums, content sites or DIY hubs such as Instructables or YouTube. No matter what, consider creating some form of community around your product or service – one that truly is a two-way street, where consumers can share feedback and talk directly with you.

So, Why Does This All Matter?

It’s clear that the Maker Movement will have a lasting effect on society, both in shaping consumer mindsets, education norms and for product design considerations. The big idea here though is that Makers represent a fearless class of creators at the intersection of art, technology and traditional DIY who are important role models for anyone with a desire to understand how to create innovative work.

And companies need to adapt these behaviors to become more innovative, to become providers for Maker-inclined consumers with tools or raw materials. Brands need to embrace a “Maker mentality” – as a way to experiment with “small bets” to build cultural permission and to be accepted as a creative part of this growing community.